Introduction

A fundamental prerequisite to the emergence a world in need of decolonisation, is the, (as James and Lorde note) misusing of difference and the creation of monsters and subhuman humans in epistemologically damaging ways. Thus, the entanglement of Euro-modern law with the design and spirit of colonialism – focused as it is on accumulation through dispossession – is characterised and operationalised by hierarchisation, dehumanisation, as well as control and disciplining along the abyssal line. In other words, through logics of enclosure and valuation, a teleological co-optation of life and nature was instituted and is reproduced by Euro-modern epistemologies. Hierarchisation, in particular, results from marking and creating human groupings through manufactured categorisations and making them accordingly increasingly vulnerable to ‘group-differentiated death’. Consequently, this chapter, and the two that follow, focus on three modes through which Euro-modern jurisprudence (re)produces a knowledge system of epistemic dispossession contingent on accumulation. Primarily this happens by adopting definitions of ‘human’, ‘space’ (as well as ‘place’ and ‘property’) and ‘time’ in law, which function in close alliance with the purposes of capital appropriation, fragmentation, constriction, and commodification. Unsettling these definitions situates body–space–time within a larger conceptual and structural system that constitutes reality, especially Euro-modern law’s worldmaking through ideology and coercion. Though these three frames are overlapping and co-constitutive, it is instructive to identify and define some of the ways in which each frame individually thus constructs reality … even as they collapse together as they fold themselves into our reality. This enfoldment makes itself known in many places, but very few are as poignant as the ‘Door of no Return’ – the last place and time in Africa where captured African bodies were still at home.